Tom Cruise may seem a bit crazy at times but he sure knows how to catch attention. This time though, he’s targeting the Chinese market.

Last week, Tom Cruise became the first Hollywood star to join Sina’s “Wei Bo” (translated as microblog) which is China’s version of Twitter.

Very quickly, in less than a week, Tom has attracted over 186,000 followers. He seems to be happy with China’s microblog and posted an interesting tweet on his official Twitter account: “We’re having fun talking to you & our new friends at http://t.sina.com.cn/ It’s the Chinese Twitter, but with a lot more functionality, CIO.” Interestingly, he is also following 404 Sina Microblog users, including pop singers from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Maybe he wants to make some Chinese celebrity friends?

There is no doubt that this is a good move by Tom and something that may become a new trend for western celebrities. China is a huge market and with Hollywood trying to reach a wide audience, staying connected with Chinese fans is definitely a good idea.

Wong Tai Sin Temple is one of the most famous shrines in Hong Kong. Every Chinese New Year, thousands rush towards the temple to burn incense and pray.

This year, the Wong Tai Sin Temple has gone for a revolutionary technological upgrade.

The 90-year-old temple has added a new underground prayer room decked with gold, marble, LED lights and motion detectors. It features a vaulted echo-enhancing ceiling emblazoned with a planetarium-like digital replica of the Hong Kong sky that rotates in accordance with the seasons. Two HK$3 million floor-to-ceiling wall hangings, made of marble and rare gemstones, adorn the entranceway. Worshippers enter the hall and deposit a written prayer before one of 60 statues representing the gods of the Chinese zodiac, which responds with flashing lights and bursts of smoke.

This 10,000-square-feet chamber costed HK$100 million (US$13 million) and took 3 years to complete.

The modernization of the 2,500-year-old religion has inspired both awe and disapproval. Further adding to the controversy is the new prayer hall’s entrance fee (HK$100; HK$50 for seniors), which makes Wong Tai Sin the first prayer facility in Hong Kong to charge admittance. A prayer offering at the temple’s automated statues costs an extra HK$300. Sik Sik Yuen, the Taoist nonprofit organization that runs Wong Tai Sin, says the fees are required for the maintenance of the new hall.

Students at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University are currently developing and testing a new Chinese input system on Android devices. This new input, named Aeviou, is similar to Swype, with the difference being that Aeviou is only for Chinese input.

There are already quite a lot of different Chinese input methods on the market which is natural, considering the keyboard was primarily designed for English language input. However, this is only when traditional keyboard input is used. For the increasing number of mobile devices released, the main method of input for Chinese is still the PinYin method. PinYin input entails having to phonetically spell out each character and then selecting the correct character among the choices. The entire Chinese language is represented by 412 phonetic combinations so it is a long and tedious list. There is also the choice of handwriting Chinese on touchscreen devices but, although it is the most natural Chinese input method, it is also the slowest. There are so many strokes in Chinese characters that it takes a long time to input a character and thereby also increasing the chance for errors.

Aeviou intends to replace traditional PinYin input methods to become the fastest and most convenient input method for mobile devices. It removes all the vowels and the letter “v” (that’s where the name Aeviou comes from), reducing the combinations for Chinese PinYin input. This lets you literally swipe through the letters with ease, just like you would with Swype. Researchers claims that their speed tests show an increase of more than 3x against other input methods.

Now that is real fast. Check out the video below for Aeviou in action and comparison with other input methods:Continue reading »

Meet China’s new $456,000 super-soaker. This unique fire truck features a jet-powered water cannon that sprays four tons of water per minute at distances up to 400 feet. The water is said to move at such speed that it choke fires from the oxygen surrounding them.

This all sounds pretty good but how does it perform in practice? Check this video below and find out:Continue reading »

This past Sunday has been labeled “Black Sunday” by Chinese netizens after China’s major file sharing site VeryCD disabled all its downloads.

Being one of the leading file-sharing sites in China, VeryCD was the major source of eMule downloads for music and videos. It had virtually everything – from Hollywood blockbusters to Korean pop songs to Japanese TV shows. Although the site is still accessible, all download links have been removed, in its place are links to licensed contents. VeryCD is now moving towards legitimacy by obtaining an official license to operate and moving towards authorized content.

After 7 years of good times, a lot of users will definitely be deeply saddened. After avoiding a crackdown against many similar sites in 2008, the pressure on VeryCD in 2011 was clearly too much. Earlier this month, China’s attempts at reducing copyright infringement have increasingly targeted the digital domain and while Youtube-like sites have taken up much of the spotlight, it was only a matter of time before linking sites like VeryCD felt similar heat.

It seems the crackdown on online piracy is now in full force and a lot earlier than most anticipated. Earlier this month, the Supreme People’s Court, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security released a document which detailed penalties for online copyright infringement.

If someone uploads a movie, TV show, music, software or even image to the Internet without the consent of the copyright holder, penalties apply if certain conditions are met. These include if more than 500 pieces of the work are spread to others, if total online downloads hit 50,000 or if a site where the material is located has a sign-up membership of more than 1,000. Penalties are harsh – between 3 and 7 years in jail.

Did you find the 262mph record that China scooped up only two months ago impressive?

Well, add another 40mph to that number as China has claimed the new speed record for unmodified commercial trains. The new line presently being tested between Beijing and Shanghai has delivered a mind-warping 302mph (486kph) top speed, which is projected to help cut down travel times between the two cities in half, down to a mere five hours. As with the Shanghai-Hangzhou connection that held the record previously, speeds with actual passengers on board will probably be limited to more moderate levels when this connections opens up in 2012, but the Chinese government’s goal is still that magical 312mph (500kph) mark.

Chinese gamers are really serious and seriously rich. Take this gamer for instance: unhappy that a competing guildmaster in the Chinese MMO Magic World Online 2 got to play in an IMAX theater, he came up with a way to play on a bigger screen. Not just a bigger screen, in fact, the World’s largest LED display. This display, measuring at 250-meter-long and 30-meter-wide, is so big that it is called the “skyscreen”. It is located in, The Place, a high-end mall in Beijing.

The most insane thing about the whole stunt is that the gamer paid RMB 100,000 (around USD 15,000) for just 10 minutes of game time. This may also earn him the title for the gamer who “wasted the most money in the least amount of time”.

Other rich Chinese gamers will have to wait until the LED screen in Dubai which will become the World’s largest when completed, before beating this record.

First, the absurd economic growth and now usurping the West in technological advancements.

Here’s some technical jargon from Engadget:

“The fully operational Tianhe-1A, located at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, scored 2.507 petaflops as measured by the LINPACK benchmark. That moves it past Cray’s 2.3 petaflops Jaguar located at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. Tianhe-1A achieved the record using 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs consuming 4.04 megawatts.”

Just to note: I’m actually being sarcastic. I don’t think China is ahead of anybody technologically.

The thought of advanced vending machines and Japan pops into mind. Who would have thought that China has also started with some “eccentric” vending machines of their own.

Just in season, an entrepreneur has imported a vending machine from Japan and stocked it full of “hairy crabs”. Chinese, especially from the Southern region, love to eat hairy crabs at this time of the year.